


No Place Between Them

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [149]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Arguing, Consensual Sex Without Condoms, F/M, Feelings Realization, Friends With Benefits, Penetrative Sex, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-16 00:25:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16074518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: One night they have sex after Ky refuses to do the dishes. It’s fine.





	No Place Between Them

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Friends with Benefits. Prompt from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

One night they have sex after Ky refuses to do the dishes. It’s fine.

One minute, they’re yelling at each other, all red face and hand gestures, and then Rey has Ky pinned against the counter and they’re kissing at the same speed they were talking and there’s spit everywhere, teeth, and when Rey runs her fingers over the swell of his jeans and moans into his mouth, this low baby doll sigh, the game, as they say, is up.

He’s pretty sure she’d take him right there next to the microwave but he’s greedy and more than sure they’ll never do this again so he carries her to the couch, the beaten one that smells too much like her dog, the one he complains about all the time but hasn’t made any move to replace, and together, they wind her out of her jeans and he kneels on the rag rug at her feet and buries his face in her cunt, eats her out until she’s wailing and yanking out his damn hair and when he fucks her, folds himself onto the couch and works his way in, she groans like he’s shot her and tugs at his t-shirt until he kisses her again, quick and eager, slow and deep.

He comes inside her and it’s bad, it’s so fucking good, because genius that he is, he’s not wearing a condom and she didn’t ask and now he knows what it’s like to fuck her without one, to be able to feel very twitch of her cunt as she flutters around him and it’s useless knowledge because this was an aberration and it’ll never happen again.

Rey arches under him, rubs herself against his body, and when he pulls out, she grabs his hand and shoves it down and down and she comes again on his fingers, on the stroke of his tongue over hers, the slide of his thumb over her clit. She knows what she wants from him, how, and it’s so hot how pushy she is with him, how outright demanding--all the shit that makes their roommate situation so fraught. But the place is great, big windows and reasonable rent, and he can walk to his job and he’s only been here six months and this is the best they’ve ever gotten along, the longest they’ve willingly spent in the other’s company, and the noise she makes when she comes, this pretty, aching trill, has him pressing their foreheads together and kneading it out, tugging at her clit to make this temporary peace last as long as he can.

“Ok,” she says, rough, “so we agree. It was your turn to do the dishes, right?”

“Yeah,” he says against her cheek, feeling the wet there, the sweet-smelling sweat. “Whatever. Fine.”

And it is, he decides later as he climbs into bed, freshly showered but still smelling of her. Because it was a fluke. A disturbance in the Force. It’ll never happen again.

Except it absolutely does.

****

The detente lasts about two weeks, two weeks of relative harmony, of swept floors, of put away dishes, of dog hair vacuumed up daily. They don’t see each other a lot--her class schedule is crazy, his hours are pretty steady at work--but when they do, there’s cordiality, even shadows of friendliness. Pleasantries are exchanged over coffee and tea, good nights shared if one’s still up when the other gets home, and there is absolutely no discussion of what had happened between them, that slight and unexpected hiccup of sex.

Does Ky think about it? Sure. His dick sure as hell does. Wakes him up a few times in the middle of night with a friendly reminder of how nice it’d felt to get laid. But his dick is an idiot and not someone Ky would ever trust for life advice so it’s great that they don’t talk about it, the best sex Ky’s had in 10 years. Absolutely freaking great.

Then his rent check is a day late--more like 12 hours, ok, seriously, less than--and she calls him at work, fussing about late fees (they aren’t any) and his lack of consideration (how do you argue with lack?) and the wholly unsatisfactory nature of his apology, and by the time he hangs up, he is steaming.

Hux looks up after Ky’s third burst of profanity and gives him an eyebrow.

“Empress Rey, I presume?”

“Ugh. Yes.”

“What did you do this time?” Hux tips back in his chair, twirling a pen between his fingers. “Speak harshly to the dog? Leave toast crumbs on the counter? Knock one of her doilies out of place?”

Ky’s hands are curled into fists. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But she does, clearly. Why the hell would she call you at work?”

“Because she’s mad and doesn’t have any impulse control? Jesus, Hux. I don’t know.”

“Hey,” Hux says, holding up his hands, “it’s not of my business. I’m just surprised you’re ok with getting screamed at by a 20 year old girl.”

“She’s not 20, Armie. She’s like two years younger than me.”

“Younger being the operative word here, eh?”

“Ugh,” Ky says, turning back to his laptop. “Shut up.”

“I’m just saying, Ky, that you really should--”

“ _Shut. Up_.”

“All right, all right. God. Touchy on this subject, aren’t we?”

It takes Ky two extra cig breaks and a fuckton of bad Keurig coffee to get through the afternoon without snapping, without winding up and punching a hole in the wall or in Hux’s monitor. It’s like a bad combo in his head, Rey’s kvetching and Hux’s needling, and by the time he gets home, he can feel it: he’s spoiling for a fight.

“Rey!” he calls when he steps in and throws his keys at the front table. “Rey! Are you here?”

She comes around the corner with wet hair in her ratty bathrobe, the dog a blur of fur at her feet, her dark eyes wide. “What the hell, Solo?”

“My check wasn’t late!” he says. “This date that you’ve set is totally arbitrary. If you’d just let me mail my own check instead of insisting that I pay you first and then you mail in just one, we wouldn’t go through this bullshit kabuki every month.”

The look on her face is amazing: he’s not sure if she’s gonna laugh at him or punch him. “We talked about this already. Like, five hours ago? Have you already forgotten?”

“No,” Ky says, “you talked, I listened, because I was at my fucking job and I can’t talk about shit there without the whole place knowing every inch of my business.”

She does laugh then, but there’s a flush on her chest, one that’s spread to the tops of her breasts and up the white column of her throat. Why is he noticing that?

“That sounds like your problem, doesn’t it?" she sneers. "If you couldn’t talk when I called, why didn’t you say so? I’m not a mind reader, Ky.”

“You don’t take no for an answer.”

“Please. You just don’t like to say it. It’s ok, let’s practice: this is me saying I don’t want to have this conversation right now, so I’m going to go finish getting dressed, ok? Thanks.”

“You’re not dressed?” Ky says.

She stops, her back half-turned. “Obviously. Bathrobes aren’t considered streetwear these days.”

The anger that’s been stoking in his head all damn day sinks like a hot stone. “But you’re not wearing anything under it, are you?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your fucking business.”

He’s moving towards her before he realizes what he’s doing. “Why didn’t you ask me to give you a minute? Why didn’t you take ten seconds to put on some pants?”

Her eyes are dark and her shoulders are pressed to the wall and she’s not running from him, she’s not looking away. “Are you saying I wanted you to see me like this?”

He takes one more step and they’re flush, the heat of her body firm against his. “Did you?”

Her hands come up slow, something half-speed, and as he watches, she catches the collars of her robe and pulls them open, exposes the blush turns of her breasts. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

He tips her back on the floor, the ruddy carpet of the hallway, and undoes the knot at her waist, releases the warm smell of her into the air. It’s strongest between her breasts, that smell, clean sweat and lavender soap, and when he sucks her nipples between his teeth, she cries out and holds his head steady, begging without words for more.

He tucks a knee between her legs and she works herself against him as he keeps lapping shamelessly at her breasts, licking and sucking and teasing her hot with his tongue and she comes like that, just from that, with a wail that brings the dog running.

They stumble into the closest bedroom, his, and he shuts the door in the dog’s face and tugs her unsteady to his bed and they kiss at last, messy and salty, as she claws at his clothes and then falls back to watch him undress.

He’s hard and he’s shaking and there’s something wild about this, the way that she watches him, like she’s hungry for it, like all she want in the whole goddamn world is him.

“Don’t,” she says when he opens his nightstand. “I want it like last time. Bare."

"We can't--"

She makes an impatient noise that goes straight to his cock. "I'm on Depro, I'm clean, and you're a fucking monk. Now come on."

There are ten thousand reasons why that’s a very bad idea and yet as he sinks to his knees between hers and teases her labia, reaches down to finger her opening, he can think of exactly 100% none.

“Ky,” she says, a warning. “Stop teasing.”

He kisses her knee. “I’m not teasing. I’m warming you up.” He sinks two fingers inside her and she gasps even as her body gives in to the stretch. "I’m getting you ready.”

“I don’t want to be ready. I want it now.”

He follows his fingers with his tongue for a moment, then two, and then her head is thrown back on his pillow, dark hair against the battered white, and she’s holding on to him, her, long thin hands cutting grooves in his shoulders.

“Ky,” she says, over and over. “Ky, Ky, come on, please.”

Only when he sinks in does she shut up, and only when he turns them over and pulls her face-first into his lap does she come again, bouncing on the girth of his cock and moaning every time he squeezes her nipples, laps at them, her breath in his hair fast and incredibly sweet.

She comes like a punch, one he can’t help but react to, and the next moment he ducks head against her breasts and lets himself go, feels her body react to each and every hot jerk.

She falls asleep in his lap, his cock still inside her, her arms slung around his chest and his neck. It’s not a long sleep, more like her body’s rebooting reaction, but for those few minutes as he holds her, he strokes her back, the curve of her hips and her thighs, he feels things that he shouldn’t, thinks of words that have no place between them. No way. Not here.

 

****

 

They stop having to fight to fuck after that, which is handy but also kind of confusing.

Handy because it’s been a long time since he had a partner, since his body got in the swing of regular sex, and if they don’t fuck every night, the three or four times a week is way better than his last decade’s average. But it's confusing, too, because sex starts to feel less like an accident and more like something deliberate.

He eats her out at her desk when she’s worn out from studying, when the language of Torts or Property Law gets too big and too much. The first time she sucks him off, he’s late getting home from a big pointless meeting and stomps in cursing under his breath and she does it right there, at the front door, holds him back against it and unzips his pants.

“Better?” she says, turning the word over the tip of his dick.

“God,” he mutters, petting feebly at the knots in her hair, “so much. Thank you.”

It’s a way to blow off steam, that’s all it is. Even when she climbs in the shower with him one morning and plays with her nipples while he washes her hair and then he has to fuck her, has to drag her from the shower still running, still soapy, and toss her wet onto her bed and ease in until they’re both gasping; has to work his hips in a rhythm that has her scrabbling for her clit and groaning gorgeous into his ear.

“Oh,” he says, playful, “you like that, huh?”

She finds his mouth with her grin. “I love the way that you fuck me,” she says. “Do it again.”

He goes to work exhausted and blissful and a half an hour late and if anybody notices any of that, none of them bother to say.

Except Hux.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

Ky doesn’t look up from the spec he’s writing, keeps his eyes locked on paragraph 8.3.1.5. “Not a damn thing.”

“Yes, there is.” He can hear Hux spin in his chair, can practically feel the look that’s oozing from his coworker’s eyes. “If I didn’t know better, Ky, I’d say you were getting laid.”

“If you didn’t know better, huh?”

“Well,” Hux says, “there’s no way your harpy of a roommate would ever let you have lady friends over, so unless you’re sleeping elsewhere these days or fucking randos in alleys or something, it can’t be that.”

Ky snorts. “‘Lady friends’? Seriously?”

“Even Phas across the hall said you had a spring in your step lately.”

“Is that what this is about?” Ky shakes his head. “I told you to forget that, man. She’s not interested in you.”

“We’re _friends_.” Hux pronounce the word like it’s a delicacy. “And friends talk to each other about things like this, the changes in mood of their coworkers.”

“She’s still not gonna sleep with you, Armie.”

“ _Oh contraire_ , padawan. She already has.”

When Ky wheels around, the look on Hux’s face is positively dripping. “When did this happen?”

“Last weekend, during that seminar that the big man sent us to up in Portland.”

“So are you guys like, dating now?”

Hux flips a hand and turns over a hearty chuckle. “Dating? Please, Ky. We’re not children. We’re--I believe the popular term is ‘friends with benefits.’”

Huh. “Meaning sex without dating?”

“Precisely.”

“Isn’t that just a hook-up?”

Hux beams. “A hook-up happens once; this arrangement leaves room for multiple encounters over time. With someone one considers a friend.”

“Ok, ew. So you’ve slept with her since then.”

“Uh, well, no. Not yet. But the possibility, you see, is still there. A very thing.”

The gears in Ky’s head are turning. Friends with benefits? Is that what he and Rey are?

...but how can they be? They’ve never been friends. Friendly, maybe, a little more than cordial, but not--

“He- _lo_ ,” Hux is saying. “Earth to Kylo.”

“What?”

Hux points. “Your phone’s pinging.”

Ky picks it up. It’s a text from Rey:

 **Out of paper towels--can you pick some up? I got milk but forgot them.  
** **Passed the test in Torts! Thank god for the curve.  
** **And thank you for this morning. I hope I didn’t make you too late.  
**

“Something important?”

“Nah,” Ky says, turning the phone over and slide it behind his laptop. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

 

****

 

“Can I ask you something?”

She sets down her pen and squints at him from under her desk lamp. “Sure.”

He leans his shoulder against the doorframe. “Are we friends?”

She blinks a couple times and scrubs at her eyes. “I’m sorry, say that again?”

“Are we friends, you and me? Is that how you think of me?”

“I think of you as Ky,” she says.

“Yes, but what I am to you?” he asks, way more direct than he’d meant to. He’d run through this talk a dozen times on his way home from work, while he ate dinner and pretend to watch TV. “Am I your friend or somebody that you hook up with, or--?”

Rey’s face blooms into pink and god help him, it’s one of the things he adores about her, how quick her body is to show how she feels. “You’re my roommate. And, ah, you’re someone I have sex with. And you’re--I guess, I’d never really thought about you as an, um. As a friend.”

Ky chews on that. “So does that make me your enemy?”

She laughs, an uneasy, brittle thing. “I don’t think the choices are that stark, do you?”

“No,” Ky says. “But I’m not sure how to think about us, is all. And I realized today that it’s starting to bother me, not understanding how it is that we relate.”

There’s more emotional honesty in that sentence than he got out in four years of long-ago married life and what staggers him is how much easier it was just to say it, how much lighter he feels already having gotten those feelings off his chest.

Rey, though, looks thoroughly taken aback. Stunned, even. Like she’s about to fall out of her chair. “Oh,” is all she says. “I see.”

“I love kissing you,” he says, because now that the honesty train is rolling, it’s not turning back. “You said this morning that you love the way I fuck you and I love that, too. But it’s more than that. I love the way you make me feel when we’re fucking, like I’m everything that you ever want, like I’m exactly what it is that you need. I love how smart you are and how angry you get when you watch the news and I love how much you love that damn dog of yours.”

“Ky,” she says, but he can’t stop.

“I love the way you know what you want and how clearly you can articulate it and I love that you don’t let me get away with any bullshit, Rey, I love that, even though that is so not your job. I love that you hold me accountable and I love the way that you taste and I love the way that you look at me when you come, like you can’t believe that it’s real, and I understand that labels are bullshit but I think of this as more than a hook-up, of you are more than a friend with benefits, and if I’ve fucked everything up by articulating how I feel for once in my stupid emotionally stunted life, then so be it, I guess.”

She’s still in her seat and her mouth is moving and her eyes are dangerously bright. “Oh, Ky,” she says hoarse. “You’re such an asshole.”

He sets his jaw, stung. “Am I?”

“You can’t throw this at me and expect an immediate response. I have a brief due in the morning, and I can’t--”

“What time is it due?”

“I have to submit it by nine.”

Ky’s heart is in his throat. “Ok. Could we revisit this tomorrow, then?”

She nods and he can see her throat close, see her swallow hard. “Tomorrow. Ok. Yeah. I think that would be better.”

He wants to kiss her. He wants to go to her and wrap his arms around her and kiss the line of her mouth until it softens and opens, until she’ll let him in.

“Or,” he says, “you know, you could always tell me to fuck off with all this. That’d be ok, too. If you wanted to keep it short and sweet.”

She shakes her head and turns back to her screen. “Good night, Ky.”

“Yeah,” he whispers once he’s closed her door, “night.”

 

****

He slips awful, fitful, and wakes up more than once convinced she’s beside him, that she’s somehow snuck in. But the bed is always cold and the room is still dark so he settles his heart each time and wander back towards sleep.

 

****

 

He opens his eyes again at four and calls out of work; leaves a message on Snoke’s voicemail. Whichever way this is gonna go, he can’t face Hux and his smugness today, can’t face reviewing 50 pages of submarine engine specifications. God, he needs a new job. But one fight at a time.

He crawls out of bed quiet and takes a shower, gets dressed like it’s Saturday and makes himself a cup of coffee, takes it out on the little terrace that sits off the kitchen. There’s room enough for two chairs and tiny side table and he can’t remember the last time he was out here, much less the last time he saw a sunrise like this, full on, rather than from behind the window of a train or a plane.

He settles in and drinks his coffee and feels the first hints of summer sneaking around the edges of dawn. Another month and it’ll be too hot to sit out here unless they get an umbrella or something, a way of staving off some of the pale New England heat.

He thinks about Rey, about her face last night, about how strange it was now to see it without some hint of a smile.

He thinks about what he’ll do if she asks him to move out; he can see that happening.

He think about what he’ll do if she wants things to stay the way they are, not-friends with benefits or whatever. It’d be hard to say no; fuck, it would. But he’d have to. He’s laid his cards on the table and this--

The door opens beside him. It’s a little after six.

“Hey,” Rey says. She’s still in her clothes from last night and her face is folded like someone in desperate need of some sleep.

“Hey.”

“I submitted it. Got to a point where my edits were hurting it, so I just stopped.”

“Ok.”

Rey looks away for a second, peers out at the rest of the city. “So, I, um, I’m going to bed to sleep for three days and I wondered if you’d like to come.”

“You what?”

She clears her throat and for the first time, behind the tired, he can see how at sea she is, how uncertain. “Do you remember that time I fell asleep in your lap after sex?”

Ky’s heart clenches. “Yeah.”

“When I woke up,” she said, “you had this look on your face that I’d never seen before, not from you or from anybody, like”--she bites at her lip--”like I was the most wonderful thing you’d ever seen.”

He reaches for her, turns his hands around her hips and pulls her gently into his lap. “You were,” he says into her hair. “I didn’t know what to do with it, but yeah. You were.”

“I loved that look,” she says, tucking her face against his neck. “I didn’t want to, but I did.”

He kisses her forehead and she sighs, slips her arms around his body and holds on long and tight.

“I need to sleep,” she says, “for a like a week.” She looks up at him, tips her head back so their eyes meet. “Can I start in your bed?”

He peels her out of her stale clothes and eats her out easy and slow, almost lazy, and she comes that way, too, like a caramel river, her cunt shivering as he pets at her inside and out. He folds himself up to kiss her and then he’s inside her, moving at the same lazy pace as she hums, her hands trying to swallow as much of his skin as they can. Their mouths are close and she’s laughing, grinning big every time she says his name, every time he cries out hers, and when he comes, it feels like it goes on forever, the pleasure a thick pleasant wave.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” she murmurs in the last instant of sense before sleep.

“Took the day off. I’m all yours once I can feel my limbs again.”

She scratches gently at his bicep and kisses his chin. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

He grins, tips his head and finds her mouth with his. “Rey,” he murmurs, “baby, you’d damn well better.”


End file.
